Power Players 2017: Choice, price, quality boost salad sales

Appealing, healthy choices are the basis of the menu at St. John’s Medical Center’s Choices Café, where the wide array of options, the customization opportunities, attractive pricing and the quality of the ingredients combine to make the salad bar the go-to choice for 85 percent of diners, including a growing number from the surrounding community.

Patients in the hospital’s 48 beds get room service from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.

Patient dining in the hospital is effected through a room service program from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. daily, offering a full menu and daily specials that, for the sake of maximum efficiency, are also offered that day at the Choices Café and in the adjacent 68-bed senior living facility for which the hospital kitchen also provides foodservice.

Aside from those choices for the hospital patients, “generally, we’ll make whatever they request” within individual dietary restrictions, says Dietary Manager Joel Dipaolo. “Since we’re fairly small, we can pretty much fill anyone’s request as long as we have the product on hand.”

The senior living residents get a buffet meal three times a day and also have access to the full room service menu from the hospital and the Choices Café menu.

“Like the hospital patients, basically they can order what they want and we’ll try to make it for them,” DiPaolo says.

The Choices Cafe operates from 6:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. and offers full breakfast and lunch menus, plus the large salad bar that represents so much of the business.

“It’s a very large salad bar and has a lot of choices,” DiPaolo says in explaining its popularity. “You could get almost anything off it. We sell by the weight so people pay only for the amount they get.”

Besides the salad bar, other options include a daily soup, a grill and a deli, plus a daily entrée special such as curry, pad Thai and salmon.

Traffic consists not just of hospital staff and visitors but also outsiders who come just for the food. “We have a pretty good following in the community and it has been that way for quite a while,” DiPaolo observes. “It attracts people looking for a quick lunch when they’re at work.”

Pricing is used to encourage healthier choices without absolutely removing less healthy options, so prices for items like sugared sodas and fried foods have been increased while prices for the salad bar were lowered, which undoubtedly has helped that station’s traffic counts.

“It’s a way of gently encouraging people to the healthier options,” DiPaolo offers.

Local purchasing of produce is limited by the dearth of agriculture in the area even though the hospital defines “local” as a 250-mile radius, which covers parts of Utah and Idaho as well as Wyoming. One recently introduced outlet of fresh produce is a vertical greenhouse that opened in Jackson and which St. John’s now patronizes.

“We try to mix it in as much as we can, as much as our budget allows,” DiPaolo says. He notes that protein categories like beef and bison are more readily available and these are purchased from local purveyors. He also gets some 4-H donations

“One thing that I think really drives the food quality here in the hospital is that we try to bring on highly skilled staff,” DiPaolo says. “There are a lot of fine-dining restaurants in town and we’ve attracted some of those chefs and cooks to work here in the hospital.”

For example, he says, the person currently running the salad bar had a sushi restaurant in town, and that commercial experience has been reflected in how the salad bar operates and the quality of the choices it offers.

St. John’s also supports a robust and growing outreach effort that includes a program called Meals With a Mission that delivers meals to oncology patients recovering at home. A recently announced $50,000 grant from the Walmart Foundation is expected to allow that program, as well as other nutrition-focused initiatives, to expand.

Now in its third year, Meals With a Mission delivers about 40 meals a month to former St. John’s cancer patients and their caregivers. The meals are prepared by St. John’s Volunteer Services Coordinator Joni Upsher and a team of volunteers in the kitchen at the Elks Lodge in Jackson, and then delivered to homes.

The cancer patients are recommended by the St. John’s oncology department for the program, and once accepted receive a meal each week.

That doesn’t sound like much at first but “generally cancer patients don’t sit down and have a big meal [at one sitting],” explains Upsher, who founded the Meals With a Mission program. “Generally, we hear from our clients that most of the times the meals last them two to three days.”

The menu runs on a four-week cycle and offers clients five choices in each category (entrée, salad, dessert, etc.) at any given time.

“It’s like going to a restaurant [except] they’re not getting the same thing every week,” Upsher offers. “We mix it up.”

One recent menu included choices like quinoa salad, roasted vegetables and feta cheese, turkey meatballs over whole-wheat pasta with a red sauce, a strawberry spinach salad, a fresh low-sugar blackberry cobbler and healthy carrot cake cupcakes. There is also always a soup, generally pureed, as many of the patients have “stomach issues,” Upsher says.

She adds that she tries to design the menu around what’s available seasonally at the local level.

“We try to buy organic and mirror the seasons,” she explains.

Meals With a Mission expansion will most likely focus initially on broadening the geographic range of the meal deliveries to encompass outlying communities as the program currently serves only the Jackson metro area.